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Topic: JD Book Club: What Are You Reading Now? (Read 66300 times)

I finally finished the Millenium trilogy. I liked them all ok, the first to me is definitely the best. I have also watched the Swedish movies and the Fincher version...both are good and neither were as good as the book.

Before vampires became sympathetic characters with their own alternate worlds, complete with vampire coffee shops and vampire politics, they used to be bad guys, scary not sexy, and they preferred wreaking havoc in horror novels rather than exuding tortured sensitivity in YA coming-of-age fiction. Fortunately, we don’t need to go all the way back to Dracula and Boris Karloff to remember those halcyon days: we have Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, from 1975. Oddly, it’s not the vampires that make ’Salem’s Lot great popular fiction. Mr. Barlow, our lead vampire, is no Dracula. He doesn’t even appear until the story is nearly half over, and he is perhaps the most one-dimensional figure in the book (but that single dimension is enough: unadulterated evil). The real main character isn’t a person at all, human or vampire: it’s the seemingly idyllic New England town of Jerusalem’s Lot. King once said that in ’Salem’s Lot, he set out to create “a fictional town with enough prosaic reality about it to offset the comic-book menace of a bunch of vampires.” He did just that by drawing on our universal fear of outsiders, and nowhere is that fear more recognizable than in our traditional image of the New England small town, where insularity itself becomes a defense against incursion by strangers. The stereotypical Yankee, befuddling outsiders with a series of cryptic yups and nopes, may be a comic character from folklore, but he is also a soldier defending his Maginot Line against potential blitzkrieg. And behind the crotchety Yankee’s seeming impregnability, there is the constant fear that one day a stranger will come to town who won’t take nope for an answer. That juxtaposition of prosaic reality against outlandish terror has always been central to King’s technique for scaring his readers. In ’Salem’s Lot, he does it by looking beneath the surface of idyllic New England. We see the pastoral beauty, the close-knit community, and the unpretentious lifestyle, yet from the beginning, we also see the harbinger of something else, something other. The novel begins with a stranger, not Barlow but a writer, Ben Mears, returning to the Lot, where he’d lived briefly as a boy. Mears has come home again not to reclaim his innocence but to expunge his demons—the memory of the body of a man dead for decades, still hanging in the closet of the Marsten House. Mears believes he hallucinated this horrible scene, but he wants to explore why it happened, why this house prompted him to imagine evil. What Mears finds when he returns to the Lot is that the Marsten House is now occupied by another stranger, our Mr. Barlow. As the known gives way to the unknown, King shows how the small-town insistence on maintaining the illusion of tranquility makes easy pickings for a vampire intent on fomenting a little evil. If ’Salem’s Lot were just another old-fashioned vampire novel, it would portray a straightforward struggle between good (people) and bad (vampires). It would not portray the arrival of vampires in the Lot as a kind of supernatural manifestation of the town’s distorted sense of itself. King feels both affection for and anger toward his small town. A part of him wants to see ’Salem’s Lot get its comeuppance, and this part gives the novel a degree of frisson that most vampire stories lack. And yet, in the end, the vampires don’t win, at least not exactly. Yes, Ben Mears pounds a stake in Barlow’s heart, but that isn’t enough. The evil continues to thrive. The town needs its own stake. Writers of every kind—from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Grace Metalious to John Updike to Carolyn Chute—have wrestled with their mixed feelings about the small towns of New England. But it took Stephen King to burn one down.

Now reading Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, Book 5) by Stephen King. I'm reading this one since it has Father Callahan from 'Salems Lot in it.

Roland of Gilead's quest to save all worlds from evil continues in this fifth installment of King's epic tale, which finds the gunslinger and his companions helping the farmers of Calla Bryn Sturgis fight against the terrifying "Wolves" who threaten to kidnap the Calla's children. Joining them is Father Callahan, who first appeared in King's second book, 'Salem's Lot (1975). Using a low, gruff voice that only Clint Eastwood could equal, Guidall aptly captures Roland's rough-edged character, but it's often difficult to distinguish between the tenors he employs for the book's many male characters. Andy the robot, however, is one character that listeners won't confuse with the others. Wise-guy gunslinger Eddie might compare Andy to Star Wars' C3PO, both in his "complacent, slightly prissy voice" and his lanky, mechanical appearance, but avid listeners will find that the tone Guidall adopts for Andy more closely resembles that of the beloved 1980s toy Speak & Spell. In the afterword, King thanks the narrator of the first four Dark Tower novels, Frank Muller, whose debilitating motorcycle accident in 2001 prevented him from finishing the series. "[A]udio insists you absorb everything," King notes, and in Muller's absence, Guidall does a fine job of bringing this epic tale to life.--udio insists you absorb everything," King notes, and in Muller's absence, Guidall does a fine job of bringing this epic tale to life.

I happened across a book I read back in school and decided a re-read was in order. It's a murder mystery by Agatha Christie called "And Then There Were None." I remembered the setup, but not the ending, so fun to read it again after all these years. Essentially, 10 people are invited to an isolated island by a mysterious benefactor, then they start dying. I love the premise of wondering who the killer is, and having your theory shift with each new murder. Despite being written over 70 years ago, I'd love to see a movie version of this.

Really? You've never heard of this? There has been quite a few movies and tv movies based on that story. There was even a play. The most famous version of this was "And then there were none" in 1945. Most recently was "Ten Little Indianas" in 1965. There are quite a few others.

I juzst finished a book entitled "Five Equations that Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics"...it delved into how some of the most famous natural phlosophers (Newton, Bernoulli, Einstein, Faraday and Clausius) casme up with their revolutionary equations.

It read more like a history book than a mathematics text, and it was very insightful.

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Peacekeeper, when it absolutely, positively has to be nuked in 30 minutes or less. Or the next nuke's free!

Really? You've never heard of this? There has been quite a few movies and tv movies based on that story. There was even a play. The most famous version of this was "And then there were none" in 1945. Most recently was "Ten Little Indianas" in 1965. There are quite a few others.

Umm...I did hear about it, as I read it back in high school. I just didn't remember the ending. I did NOT know there were a few movie renditions, though I admittedly don't watch much that was made before 1975. Have you seen either of the movies? Any good? I was thinking a modern remake of the story on film would be well received.

"A Clash of Kings" by George R R Martin. Just finished "A Game of Thrones" a week ago. I have yet to see the series, so I'm happy about that.

The books and the television series have definitely been divergent of one another. That was more apparent with season 2. I'm wondering if the next couple of seasons of the HBO series will be more true to the books, since they're going to be stretching book 3 into two seasons of the tv show.

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